Year-End Sign Off

December 19, 2016 | Jason Freure

Hear ye, hear ye! We’re signing off for 2016!

The Town Crier is taking some time off! It’s been a busy year and we’re finally wrapping it up until January.

We published a lot in 2016 and it was an exciting thing to see. I feel lucky to have had the chance to publish pieces like Evangeline Freedman’s graphic essay on Julie Doucet, Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s “Taking English for a Spin,” and Cian Cruise’s dive into the place where Anne of Green Gables meets Rambo. There were a lot of truly important pieces: Julie Mannell’s “Small Town Asshole” series, Jocelyn Parr’s “Try Not to Puke,” Julia Tausch’s “Guys in My MFA,” Jihyun Rosel Kim’s “Hyphenated Fluency,” just to get started.

Puritan staffers broke new ground for the blog, too, with exciting pieces like Dana Ewachow’s Neon Demon takedown, Paula Razuri’s review of Double Teenage, Suzanna Derewicz’s interview with Eva HD, and E Martin Nolan’s omnibus, “Close Reading on the Pitcher’s Mound.” You’ll see more from all four of them in 2017 as Derewicz and Razuri join Ewachow and Nolan as TC columnists, alongside more new additions to the team starting in January.

A lot of the pieces we published on the blog in 2016 that I found exciting came in thanks to the Guest Editor program. Six out of 12 months every year we hand the reigns over to someone else and this year, each editor earned unprecedented attention and delivered some truly incredible work. Thank you, again, to Julie Mannell, Laura Kenins, Geneviève Robichaud, Kilby Smith-McGregor, Klara du Plessis, and Cian Cruise. Expect to see six great authors, editors, and curators take the blog in whole new directions next year, too.

Of course, it’s not just the writers and editors who keep the TC running along day in and day out. When I took over in November 2015, Fawn Parker became our proofreader and SEO guru, and she tackled pieces of truly epic proportions, for which I can’t thank her enough. While she has moved on and now edits Bad Nudes, Kirstie Turco has joined the team and in only two months she’s proven herself indispensable to the blog’s operations.

It’s been great, 2016. The Town Crier is taking a much-deserved break, one that started far too late because we actually had too much to publish before the end of the year to quit early. That’s a problem I don’t mind having and hope I run into again and again. But we won’t be gone too long. As you head back to work or school in January, expect to find us back at the grind, too.